His is the Enlightenment of the "long 18th century". "What", he asked in a footnote to an essay on civil marriages, "is enlightenment?" Should we be discussing "the" Enlightenment, as if it were a singular phenomenon, or "enlightenments"? If there are plural schools of thought, to what extent are they nationalistically inflected? What unites and what divides the French Enlightenment of Voltaire, d'Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, Montesquieu and De Tocqueville from the Scottish Enlightenment of Hume, Smith, Kames, Ferguson, Robertson and Hutcheson, from the German Aufklärung, dominated by Kant, but also including Goethe, Stäudlin, Leibniz, Humboldt and Lichtenberg? Was there an English Enlightenment, a tradition of rationalism stretching from Bacon and Hobbes to Locke and Shaftesbury and eventually Paine and Wollstonecraft? And even if we admit to several concurrent lines of thoughts in different countries, how do we account for the vast contradictions within them – is there common ground between, say, Rousseau and La Mettrie?Īnthony Pagden is very much of the camp that believes an "Enlightenment", across several countries and with broad similarities of purpose and method, did indeed occur. I n 1783, Johann Friedrich Zöllner, a theologian, posed a question that we are in some ways no nearer to answering.
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